How humanizing your brand improves social media marketing

Social media marketing campaigns take time to plan and execute. Nowadays, they aren’t just about expanding your reach or announcing a new product or promo. To create more meaningful customer relationships, you must ensure that your marketing messages convey your brand’s personality accurately.

Brand personality can be defined as a set of human characteristics attributed to a brand. The image you convey can shape the way people think about your company and your products or services.

Humanizing your brand is not easy. You need an all-encompassing digital marketing plan to ensure that your brand messages and customer interactions are consistent across all platforms. But if executed properly, it can boost customer engagement. Here’s why your social media marketing campaign needs a dash of personality.

1. Stand out from the crowd.

By humanizing your marketing messages, you can make your brand stand out. Highlighting the qualities that make your brand unique makes you more memorable.

For example, last January, Wendy’s handled trolls in an interesting way. Their Twitter account adopted a snarky and sassy personality to deal with trolls—a behavior that’s very uncommon among brands. This allowed them to generate a lot of interest from audiences, enabling them to stand out from a number of fast food chains.

Note, however, that this only worked because Wendy’s has already established a strong customer base. This strategy won’t probably be effective for smaller brands that are still in the process of generating a following. But if you’re confident about using this technique, chances are that you’d earn your customers’ praise.

2. Build customer relationships on a personal level.

Highlighting your brand personality can add a personal touch to the customer engagement, leading you to create better and closer relationships with your target market. Customers trust brands that are relatable, as this indicates that they can fit into people’s networks and lifestyles.

Humanizing your brand can also make customers feel like they’re interacting with real people instead of a corporate drone.

Take for example Netflix, one of the most successful companies to utilize social media. They use geo-targeting to deliver the right content to specific audiences around the world. They don’t just promote their shows. They also post entertaining videos, GIFs, memes, and photos to generate meaningful and entertaining conversations.

3. Give your brand a unique voice.

Your brand personality sets the tone of your interaction with customers. If your brand exudes an adventurous, thrill-seeking personality, you need to communicate this through your marketing messages.

An example of this is chocolate maker Cadbury’s Facebook page. Their social media account highlights chocolate’s known euphoric effects as a way of conveying their branding. Note that Cadbury’s tagline goes “tastes like this feels,” which shows that their aim is to evoke positive emotions among customers by producing high-quality products. This matches the upbeat and optimistic personality they showcase on social media.